Mathematics

On August 27th (Monday), we have started learning about math. In grade 5 we’ve been learning about patterns and shapes and mostly number patterns. We’ve been coming back to it and we’re learning more about number patterns. We also took a pre assessment to tell our teacher what we know how to do and what we don’t know how to do. It’s just a prior-knowledge test.

Revise

Before we started doing math, we did a practice on math. It made me remember what a table of value was, and I think i’ve improved on showing values and terms on that table.

When we were doing the activities, I learned about brain paths and how people learn math and other subjects. It was also interesting to learn about what other people want people to say to their them and what they don’t want people to say to them. I’ve learned about patterns and some unique ones that I never thought of before. It also brought me back to thinking about prime numbers.

Reveal

I think the most important thing i learned about while doing this was learning about the brain paths. I never knew how the brain worked and what would happen if you learned a new word. Since we learned about puberty last year, we would have found out about brain paths but when I was researching, I didn’t see anything about brain paths. The video we watched told us about how you learn math.

React

Now that i’ve seen different and unique patterns, how the brain works, and how people want other people to talk to them while doing math, I think i’m going to try and watch my words before I talk, and try to be more creative with patterns.

On August 1st, we have finished grade 4 and now moving on to grade 5! This blog post is a little bit late because we had to do a lot of things. Now we are on our next unit. This blog post, I am going to talk about a math game that I played online as an extra.

We played this game called Deep Sea Dive on the website called Illuminations. It’s a game where you can choose which grid you have. They have a 16 bubble grid and a 9 it says the target number on the top of the screen., and then you have to match the number so then it adds up to the target number.

I played the game a couple of times and I won a lot of them. Once you won like 4 times, the game gets harder and it can add in decimals and maybe even negative numbers!

The things I learned from this is how to add decimals. It was also very entertaining. Once I got to the decimals, I lost quite a bit. First when I tried it I kept guessing. Sometimes I won and sometimes I didn’t. I mostly didn’t. If you want to see the link, click HERE!

Before this, we had to do a summative test of UOI. This summative was about the first unit. It was about what we needed our classroom community to look like. By that, it meant that we needed to talk about what we wanted everyone to act, or what we actually wanted our classroom community to look like (Arranging tables and changing the design).

I am fast at typing, so I finished it earlier than some people. We also had this paper to correct our work and correct our mistakes. I added a few more ideas because the minimum of paragraphs were at least like 7-11 paragraphs.

This was a summative task, which means we can’t help other people. I helped someone a little bit but then I didn’t know.

I think I was successful with my writing piece. Maybe to improve it, I can add more details. In case you want to read it yourself, just go HERE!

I felt very happy since the start of the year. The only thing is that people kept talking when I was trying to focus.

On May 2, we had to code a little cat called Scratch, we had a challenge and we needed to make a tessellation. A tessellation is when you draw the same things over and over and over again until it fills up the paper. There has to be no gaps. You could pick any shape to tessellate. I chose to do a tessellation of a triangle.

This was my first time coding. I do not know how many times I could successfully tessellate the triangle. There is probably about more than 30. Scratch sometimes drew what I expected. Sometimes I was puzzled about why Scratch suddenly overlapped the triangles. I finally figured it out because there was a limited amount of space. When it gets to the edge/corner, it turns back and it overlaps,

The most challenging part in this task was the coding. Sometimes I did not understand what most of the codes meant. When I tried it, I followed the code really closely so that I know what it does and I know what Scratch is doing.

I have learned a lot this lesson because this is just my first time doing scratch. I have learned what all of the movements meant. Some of them are: Pen up, Pen down, and pick random. Pen up means Scratch puts his pen up. Pen down is the opposite and instead Scratch puts his pen down. Pick random () () Means where it’s gonna go like the direction. So you have to give the coordinates to Scratch so he knows where to start and go.

I enjoyed exploring this new coding programme and am looking forward to the next challenge.

This week, we started doing our design project. We had to design the house and measure the length of each wall. First, we had to do a draft, then we went to a big graph paper, then we can finally build it on Minecraft. I chose to write about this because I thought it was cool.

While we were doing this, we were learning about perimeter. Perimeter is the length of the outside of a 2D shape. I had to restart because my house wasn’t connected to the walls, so I am still on the draft.

We could choose what we wanted to build. I decided to build a house. In my house, I have a bedroom, a guest room, a kitchen, the living room and the bathroom. If I have time, I am going to make a second floor.

I think the most important thing this week is when we were learning the angles, vertices, edges and faces. We also learned the degrees of each angle. I thought it was the most important because most of us didn’t know the ALL of the angles cause we didn’t know what a lot of them were called. We also learned about 3D and 2D shapes.

The 3D Shapes had vertices, edges and faces. The 2D shapes had sides. It was like we were doing a review on the shapes.

I thought that learning about the angles were the most important because most of us did not know all the angles. We only knew the right angle. Other than the right angle, we learned about the acute angle, obtuse angle, reflex angle and the straight angle. The acute angle has below 90 degrees. The obtuse angle is above 90 degrees but less than 180 degrees. The right angle was 90 degrees. I forgot the degrees of the straight and the reflex angle. The reflex angle is where the points of any shapes are like a triangle. The tip of the triangle is the reflex angle.

We also learned perpendicular, quadrilateral and parallel lines. A perpendicular is when 2 lines link together. A quadrilateral is a shape that has sides. A parallel line is when there are 2 lines but they never link up.

On November 22th, I made a map about forces. I used BrainPOP to find out the information about force. I found out what net force, velocity, vector, friction, acceleration, non-contact force and contact force mean.

Some examples of contact forces are pulling, pushing, dragging and friction. Contact means like you are talking with someone, touching something or interacting. For contact forces, it means touching something. So if you add contact forces together, it means you are touching something to move.

Non contact force is the opposite of contact forces. Non-contact means that you aren’t touching anything to move. A example of non-contact forces are magnetism and electrical forces cause they are doing things by themselves. Like if you put 1 magnet close together with another one, it will automatically connect.

Friction is when something is about to slow down, speed up or turn any direction. 3 examples of friction is dragging, contact force and acceleration.

I learned a lot from the BrainPOP video, and enjoyed making the mind-map about forces.

The way I solve addition problems is using Base 10 Blocks. A lot of people use this strategy but I think this is the most helpful other than the standard strategy. The equation I chose to answer was 49+64. First I started drawing 49, so I drew 4 of the 10 blocks and 9 of the ones blocks. That equals 49. Now i’m gonna do 69, so I put 6 of the 10 blocks and 4 of the ones blocks. That equals 64. Next, I add them together and it equals 113. If you need to check if 113 was the right answer, you can do 113-64 which equals 49. And you can do the same with 49, like 113-49=64. Then that means that your answer is correct.

I enjoy using this strategy and I think it is the 2nd fastest way of solving addition problems.

We made bar graphs! We collected data of what our questions. I asked “Which Pet”. My choices were “Cat, Dog, Snake, Fish, Tarantula, Fish, Other, I don’t have a favourite pet…” Most of us were confused because we didn’t know who we asked and who we didn’t ask. Some people even had to restart. I didn’t restart because I already knew who I didn’t ask. I was lucky!

After collecting data we had to create the graph, I did a graph on my book. I already finished it. I created the final one at Create A Graph Classic. I got a bit mixed up because I entered the name Create A Graph instead of Create A Graph Classic so I chose the wrong one and had to restart my work. 🙁 We could also use Pie Charts. I really enjoyed using the bar graph!

We also learned the words for the bar graph like range, mode and other things. We already learned them last year, but we forgot almost all of them. We even forgot the scale! But I think we are all on the computers to create a bar graph.

I tried to make my robot move backward, forward, turn left and right and beep (Sing). The thing that went well was that I made a really long coding thing for my robot to do. And it did that I wanted it to do. I had a successful robot. The hard part was to not forget the waits because after every action, you have to put wait or it will not stop. My other challenge was I couldn’t find out which was a high note for my robot to sing and what was a low note for my robot to sing. I learned how to programme robots. I felt successful because I figured out a lot of my challenges by testing them out.

We have an assembly! Though we made many mistakes and were very messy, we practised today and it was better than yesterday. Now we ran through it we now know the order of things. And now we are ready. Last time we had to keep printing, but the printer didn’t have paper. So we kept going back and forth and last time, we had trouble memorising our scripts, so our homework was to memorise them. Now almost all of us remember our lines! And our learning buddies are going to come watch it. I am very scared because my friends keep saying “Good Luck, Good Luck” to me for almost the whole week!

Finally, we did our assembly! Some people kept laughing and they couldn’t hear me talk. It was sad :(.

P.E

Some time in the week, we had P.E. But we didn’t get much done because we had a different teacher. It was Mrs. T. So we spent a lot of time getting confused and asking questions just because we didn’t know what to do. And for the last part, we were about to play Dr. Dodgeball. But she spent so much time explaining the rules (Even if we already knew it), so we only got like 1 minute to play and then when 4A came back, I asked them “How was P.E?” And they said that they got like 30 minutes to play Dr. Dodgeball. I thought it wasn’t fair.

P.A

I finally brought my P.A folder, so I didn’t have to sit out and do Air Recorder. Though it was a disaster because we kept laughing at a note and we had to try to stop ourselves and that took a long time.

ISA Test (International School

Assessment)

For Tuesday and Wednesday, we have no Chinese cause we have a ISA test. When I came from the 7th floor, up to the 9th floor, everyone kept saying “Yay! No Chinese!” It was really annoying. When we first started the Assessment, I thought that the first part was really easy. I thought that it was fun. We did Mathematical Literacy part 1 and part 2, we did writing part 1 and 2. And we also did the reading. It was reading comprehensions. It was also really easy and I enjoyed it. I hope I get a good grade.